I never stopped being amazed by the sheer idiocy of some "environmentalist" ideas. Today, for instance, Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times writes a long column about the marvels of getting New Yorkers to convert to shopping bags that can be reused in place of those ubiquitous plastic bags that go to landfills. The most amazing thing about this article is that Rosenthal is actually a trained physician.
If you don't see the irony here, perhaps it will help if I tell you that reuse of shopping bags has been blamed for all manner of gastro-intestinal diseases. Those cloth or woven bags that appear again and again at checkout counters suck in all manner of bacteria from the food they carry. One package of chicken parts that leaks onto the bag can put huge numbers of pathogens into the fibers of the bag. When the bag is next used, those pathogens can end up on the skin of organic apples or on some other vegetable or fruit that will be eaten raw. The current estimate is that thousands of people are becoming seriously sick each year due to diseases transmitted in this way.
There is a remedy for the tranmission of disease through the use of cloth bags which is not very difficult to carry out. After each use, the bags must be laundered using hot water. This will kill the bacteria. Of course, the problem with that use is that the energy used to run the washing machines and to heat the water leads to much more pollution than the simple plastic bag which is thrown away after one use.
The truth is that switching to bags that get reused provides society with a poor choice: more sick people or more pollution. In other words, the switch does not make sense. For the most part, this reminds me of the big push to switch to electric cars. That change reduces the amount of oil being used for fuel. At the same time, however, the increased use of electricity results in a major increase in the burning of coal to generate electricity. In other words, switching to electric cars by itself results in increase air pollution with a larger carbon footprint. It may sound good, but it certainly is not.
If you don't see the irony here, perhaps it will help if I tell you that reuse of shopping bags has been blamed for all manner of gastro-intestinal diseases. Those cloth or woven bags that appear again and again at checkout counters suck in all manner of bacteria from the food they carry. One package of chicken parts that leaks onto the bag can put huge numbers of pathogens into the fibers of the bag. When the bag is next used, those pathogens can end up on the skin of organic apples or on some other vegetable or fruit that will be eaten raw. The current estimate is that thousands of people are becoming seriously sick each year due to diseases transmitted in this way.
There is a remedy for the tranmission of disease through the use of cloth bags which is not very difficult to carry out. After each use, the bags must be laundered using hot water. This will kill the bacteria. Of course, the problem with that use is that the energy used to run the washing machines and to heat the water leads to much more pollution than the simple plastic bag which is thrown away after one use.
The truth is that switching to bags that get reused provides society with a poor choice: more sick people or more pollution. In other words, the switch does not make sense. For the most part, this reminds me of the big push to switch to electric cars. That change reduces the amount of oil being used for fuel. At the same time, however, the increased use of electricity results in a major increase in the burning of coal to generate electricity. In other words, switching to electric cars by itself results in increase air pollution with a larger carbon footprint. It may sound good, but it certainly is not.
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